When the Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) moved from its downtown digs to Culver City last year, I noted that the relocation marked a return in spirit to its previous residency in Westwood in the 2000s--where its cluster of venues within walking distance of one another and its close proximity to UCLA gave it the self-contained energy of a festival. Well, I thought that, anyway, but according to IndieWire's Anne Thompson, LAFF lost 45 percent of its audience last year in the wake of its westward move. So this year, under the leadership of Jennifer Cochis, LAFF expanded its presence, retaining
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, Monday, July 10 on P.O.V. is Feras Fayyad's Last Men in Aleppo, a vivid and heartbreaking account of wartime Syria told through the eyes of the White Helmets volunteer rescue workers. The film won the 2017 Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. Currently streaming on MUBI is Sophie Huber's Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, an intimate and impressionistic portrait of the enigmatic American actor. The Boston Globe calls it "an unexpectedly
Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, four DocuClub alums have premiered their works on the festival circuit over the past few months. In an effort to both monitor and celebrate the evolution of these films to premiere-ready status, we reached out to the filmmakers as they were winding their way through the festival circuit. Following their DocuClub screening last fall, Jamie Meltzer premiered his film True Conviction at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it earned a Special Jury Mention for Documentary Feature. The
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Showing July 5 and 6 as part of KCET and Link TV's " EARTH FOCUS Presents" series is 2007's The 11th Hour, created, produced, co-written and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. The Christian Science Monitor called it "considerably less slick than An Inconvenient Truth, and no less urgent." Currently streaming on Netflix is Alma Har'el's genre-bending documentary LoveTrue, which tackles three complementary stories that demystify the fantasy of true love. IndieWire writes that "Har
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! At I ndiewire, Anne Thompson tells the story behind Ryan White's true crime Emmy-contender The Keepers. White worked closely with freelance journalist Tom Nugent; he'd tracked the story for years, but couldn't get it published and resorted to blog posts instead. "The story was virtually undercover," said White.
Editor’s Note: Primary , the epochal vérité masterpiece from four of Drew Associates, captured the behind-the-scenes drama of candidate/US Senator John F. Kennedy as he campaigned across Wisconsin in the early days of his journey to the White House. Enabled by the dynamics of synch-sound and the portability of the cameras that Drew Associates had developed, Primary achieved an unprecedented fluidity and intimacy that transformed documentary-making. Nonetheless, the major US networks passed on airing the film, while Time-Life Television aired it on select independent television stations across
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Opening the new season of POV tonight is Julia Meltzer's Dalya's Other Country, the nuanced story of members of a family displaced by the Syrian conflict who are remaking themselves after the parents separate. It follows its title character, a Syrian teenager, over the course of four years. Premiering Tuesday, June 27 on America Reframed is Vegas Baby, Amanda Micheli's film about aspiring parents who enter a contest to win a free round of in-vitro fertilization. The Hollywood
Sporting the new name SFFILM, the San Francisco International Film Festival celebrated its 60th birthday from April 5 to 19 at its usual haunts at the Castro Theatre, Alamo Drafthouse New Mission, Roxie and Victoria Theatres in San Francisco and the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley. Three new venues - SF Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Dolby Cinema - established a beachhead in the South of Market district. SFFILM's strong documentary section screened 35 features and some shorts, many of local Bay Area interest. Thomas Riedelsheimer's Leaning into the Wind -
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! At I ndiewire, Anne Thompson details the "fiasco" behind the new Buena Vista Social Club sequel. Back in January, Lucy Walker was on the verge of debuting her fifth feature at Sundance — the high-profile sequel to Wim Wenders’ 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary, The Buena Vista Social Club. It was the best-possible
Two filmmakers from Mumbai are facing difficulties in screening their film An Insignificant Man in India despite the many international screenings that took place over the past months. The Indian censor board requires the filmmakers to get a no-objection-certificate from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Directors Khusboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla have launched a social media campaign to raise awareness for the unacceptable censorship policies in India. The Hindi-English documentary An Insignificant Man - which premiered at Toronto International Film Festival last year - chronicles the anti